Posts Tagged ‘Ray Wylie Hubbard’

An electrified banshee was brewing outside the Ale House, but inside the Troy venue a standing-room-only crowd soaked up the dry-witted extemporizing, eclectic stories and brilliant songs of sin and redemption by Ray Wylie Hubbard on a Tuesday night. It was a helluva good time.

Hubbard’s last visit to the Capital Region was in 2012 at The Linda, and evidently he had made a strong impression because many in attendance were chatting about various song titles even before he began his set. Donning an acoustic guitar and backed by Kyle Snyder on a minimal drum kit and assorted percussion instruments, Hubbard sang in a voice that betrayed his formerly wild ways and affirmed his two decades of sobriety and prodigious creativity. “Rabbit” and “Snake Farm” provided a fine one-two combo: the former was a rumination on hunting; and the latter, a crock-pot cooker-styled blues about a free-spirited woman named Ramona who works at a reptile house, had the crowd singing the chorus (“Snake Farm, it just sounds nasty/ Snake Farm, it pretty much is”) to Hubbard’s delight from the get-go.

Ray Wylie Hubbard remembers asking Stevie Ray Vaughan what it was like to be sober. “I just couldn’t see myself never taking another drink again. It had become so important,” says Hubbard, the Americana singer-songwriter who plays The Linda WAMC’s Performing Arts Studio on Central Avenue in Albany on Monday (May 14).

“Stevie said once he’d got sober, it was like he’d took off the boxing gloves. He could really play.”

Hubbard at first didn’t understand what the blues-rocker was saying to him. After all, Stevie Ray had put out all those defining albums before he got straight. Stevie told Hubbard, “Once I got sober, it’s like I could really play. I could play everything. There was nothing between me and the music. That kind of gave me some hope. There was no alcohol or drugs between me and the music. That was the place I really wanted to be.”